The VIX rose almost 40% in the afternoon session and XIV took its biggest hit ever with a 9.5% decline.
Conspiracy bloggers noted how convenient today's plunged appeared...yesterday was expiration for hundreds of thousands of VIX options which expired worthless. Had today's events occurred yesterday a lot of VIX call holders would be a lot, lot richer. That's the market for you.
Today's drop definitely put the scare into a lot of traders and if the trend follows the classic 3 day buy/sell cycle then there's more to come.
Technically the SPY and XIV TrendX charts are approaching support levels...that's on the positive side.
Even XLU utilities took a hit, unusual for a red wave, but the metals GLD and SLV soared.
I'm listening to the evening financial news and the analyst just said, "I don't see any cause for concern; there's a tragedy somewhere in the world every day. This one was just high profile enough to rattle the markets".
Quite a rattle.
